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On this day in Engineering History, the MAUD Committee was established by Henry Tizard to investigate feasibility of an atomic bomb. The MAUD Committee was the beginning of the British atomic bomb project, before the United Kingdom joined forces with the United States in the Manhattan Project.
 The MAUD Committee authored a report that studied the possibility of developing a nuclear weapon, and maintained that it was feasible to fast fission a sufficiently purified critical mass of uranium-235. Building upon theoretical work on atomic bombs performed by refugee physicists Rudolf Peierls and Otto Frisch in 1940 and 1941, the MAUD report estimated that a critical mass of ten kilograms would be large enough to produce an enormous explosion.
In July of 1941, Vannevar Bush and James Conant, members of the newly formed National Defense Research Committee (NRDC), received a draft copy of the report. American scientists had been in contact with the MAUD Committee since the fall of 1940, but it was the July 1941 MAUD report that helped focus the American bomb effort. Laid out in the report were specific plans for producing a bomb, authored by a distinguished group of scientists.
The MAUD report dismissed plutonium production, thermal diffusion, the electromagnetic method, and the centrifuge and recommended gaseous diffusion of uranium-235 on a massive scale. The British believed that uranium research could lead to the production of a bomb in time to affect the outcome of the war.
Supported by the findings in the report issued by the MAUD Committee, the Manhattan Engineer Project was set up in the United States in 1942.
Resources:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MAUD_Committee
http://www.cfo.doe.gov/me70/manhattan/maud.htm
http://www.mphpa.org/classic/HISTORY/H-04e.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhattan_Project
http://cr4.globalspec.com/blogentry/5450
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